Did you find that to be true for Opus 5.5 as well?

I couldn't use prior Claude models without rolling my eyes at the writing every few sentences, Astra was refreshing and then Opus 5.5 made even Astra look terrible in comparison.

Opus 5.5 got better for me but it still has some problematic behavior.

Interestingly, you can have informative conversations about the LLM linguistic tics with the LLMs themselves. One word that chatgpt used to describe what I was observing was linguistic anaphora (not rhetorical). It’s basically shortening/compression achieved via pronoun, and Claude does a lot of it. Worth reading about. A lot of it seems to do with how the new models are trained for brevity.

Another pattern I’m starting to become very sensitive to is Claude making up on the fly jargon for something under consideration, especially in code review. This morning for example it referred to “a claim” out of nowhere, and when I questioned it, it admitted that it was using the noun as shorthand for a record getting dequeued (“claimed”) inside of an sql transaction. It makes sense if you already know what it is referring to but in a code review it’s totally incomprehensible on first read, and ultimately counterproductive.

I still find Opus 5.5 way too dense. MUCH better than Opus 5 which was unreadable.

Even the Plain English hack only is a temporary solution.